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Topic: Karlheinz Stockhausen has died (Read 5709 times)

News reports say that Karlheinz Stockhausen died a couple of days ago.

Though I have a few Stockhausen CDs, I'll admit he was one of those difficult artists I always felt I should make a better effort to grasp, but never quite got around to loving or truly appreciating his work. I remember him being name-dropped in some strange novel I read in college, and reading his name mentioned frequently in The Wire as an influence to various and sundry artists, and figuring this was somebody I needed to investigate.

Any thoughts on Stockhausen? Did anybody get around to gaining some better appreciation of his work than I was able to do?

When I studied electronic music in college, I remember being exposed to Stockhausen's "Gesang Der Junglinge," a electronic tape piece based on processed children's voices. Very strange stuff. I think that some of his more "outside" electronic pieces using shortwave and contact microphones (such as "Mikrophonie" and "Hymnen") may have influenced some of the early industrial musicians in the 80s and maybe even of the field recording-oriented folks today. I found his pieces with more conventional classical instrumentation on DGG to be less interesting, very serial and almost atonal in nature. I think he obtained control of his entire DGG back catalog and reissued them a few years ago for 2-3X the price of a regular CD. I still see copies of them at Amoeba, but have not been tempted to pick them up.

When I studied electronic music in college, I remember being exposed to Stockhausen's "Gesang Der Junglinge,"

Same here, "Gesang Der Junglinge" (I think that translates as Songs of the Youth) was considered a landmark piece for its time as he combined musique concrete and pure electronics. From what I remember being taught his use of musique concrete dffered from the norm in that it was composed where as most pieces in that style were random splicing of elements together.

I have to say I never really "enjoyed" listening to his music on a pure asthetic level but I understand the historical significance of it. I remember reading an interview with him once back in the early 1980s that he had scheduled out his entire compositional output well into the 21st century.